Concerns about safety in patient care have called attention to the need for governmental agencies and private sector accrediting bodies to work together with health care organizations to coordinate the monitoring, reporting, and analysis of medical errors. The 2003 Institute of Medicine report, Patient Safety: Achieving a New Standard of Care [1], recommends that standardization and better management of information on patient safety—including near misses and adverse events— are needed to inform the development of strategies that reduce the risk of preventable medical incidents. However, patient safety incident reporting systems differ in design and therefore in their ability to define, count, and track adverse events [2]. Among reporting systems, there are often disparate data fields, conflicting patient safety terminologies, classifications, characteristics, and uses that make standardization difficult. In addition, each source of data on near misses and adverse events usually requires different methods for interpreting and deconstructing these events [3]. Finally, misused terminology in the research literature, conference papers and presentations, and media contributes to widespread misunderstandings about the language of patient safety.

extremely difficult to achieve broad-based and timely improvements in patient safety, since there is no standard determination as to which events to capture and report [5,6]. Additionally, the lack of a common patient safety terminology is a critical obstacle to sharing and aggregating data to support patient safety.

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